I’ve been this forest once.
The majestic canopy silently growing in the night. The ever-changing winds of winter. The moon and the stars.
The deep shadows of trees beneath trees. The trembling leaf ready to fall. All life unfolding quietly.
The beating heart of the woods.
Sometimes I remember being the forest.
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Photography cultivates a certain awareness and attention to detail. You walk on the street, all senses awake. There’s this detail here and that situation over there. You can see things developing into something that could be a good photo. You anticipate. You position yourself in the right place and wait for the right moment.
Sometimes (in fact, many times) that place was far from being the right one. And the right moment passed before you could react. Or never arrived. But the experience is still yours to enjoy. It wasn’t pointless.
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This is my last post for 2022. December is often a month of reckoning, revisiting, and trying to make sense of what happened.
I need to accept how things are in order to go ahead and be prepared for how they could be.
I need to make peace with how things are in order to be able to turn them into what they could be.
Aren’t we all?
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This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, hosted by Amy, is all about mountains.
In the mountains, I’ve felt at peace, exhilarated, grateful, exhausted, scared, lost. I walked endless trails that took me way out of my comfort zone. I found myself up on the mountain, in the wild, as it was getting dark, wondering how will I make it back down. I found myself in danger (just because I’ve put myself in danger) and felt my life hanging on a thread. I found myself so incredibly at peace with everything out there, me included. I felt that I belong.
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Photography has taught me to pay attention.
Pay attention to details but also to how these details combine to form a meaningful scene.
Pay attention to the quality of light and the juxtaposition of colors and textures.
Pay attention to what happens out there not just in my head.
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Anne’s question for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is “What’s your photographic groove?”. Well, that’s a question I’ve been asking myself quite a lot lately. And there’s a gap between the kind of photography that I’m currently doing (and feeling comfortable doing) and the kind of photography that would speak to me the most.
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Since Sarah (from Travel with me) invited us to share three of our favorite photos, I thought about what I would choose and, more broadly, about how we relate critically to our own work.
The photos that tend to stay with me are those that tell a story that’s meaningful to me. Those that reconnect me to that past moment when I took the photo, but also to the story, emotion, mood, or idea that stayed with me over time. Although I tend to overthink and over-intellectualize in other parts of my life, when it comes to photography I go with the gut. I know (or feel) that some compositions make sense long before I start analyzing them.
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The sun emerges slowly from the sea, hesitating as if the heaviness of the water is holding it back. The small beach is full of crabs that were washed ashore by the tide and eaten by the seagulls. One crab carcass has been flipped over and now it catches the morning sunlight.
There’s nobody around.
The soft waves carry the memory of water in an endless back and forth.
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This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, hosted by Sylvia, is all about doors and doorways.
Doors. We open and close them dozens of times each day. We use them to organize our space. To get access. To open to the world. To protect from the world.
But there are also doors that won’t open. They are not in use anymore or they’ve never been in use. They seem to be there to hide rather than reveal something.
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Almost anything can be improved by removing stuff. Simplifying it. Getting rid of the clutter. Then getting rid of even more clutter, which at first glance may have seemed important.
It works with books, photographs, relationships, or lives.
We are compulsive hoarders of sensations, emotions, objects. We commit to impossible schedules and we have impossible ambitions. We want to be everywhere and part of everything. Not miss out. Not be left out. We live on the run and then, from time to time, we inevitably break down.
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